


Kindling

by writingmonsters



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, FinnPoe if You Squint Mostly, Just Tears and Hugs, Kind of a character study, Star Wars: The Last Jedi Spoilers, could be gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-19
Updated: 2017-12-19
Packaged: 2019-02-16 23:33:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13064493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writingmonsters/pseuds/writingmonsters
Summary: Even the brightest spark can't keep burning forever without fuel.[Not TLJ Spoiler Free - No Big Spoilers, But Definitely Not "Safe"]





	Kindling

The Millennium Falcon hums in hyperspace – a toneless, throaty lullaby to the tune of the thrumming hyperdrive and the whirr of the support systems that makes Poe feel like crawling out of his skin. He’s had too little sleep and too much adrenaline slopping in his veins, and normally it makes him sharper, clears his head in a rush of _this_ and _now_ and pure, certain instinct that tastes like blood and carbon smoke. Tonight – Today – whatever moment this is, the last dregs of the high leave him jittery, scooped out and shivering like a Death Stick junkie in need of a fix.

He can’t seem to stop his hands from trembling, can’t shake the terrible pressure that is too tight behind is breastbone. They’ve asked him to be a leader. General Organa had slapped the sense into him, had flayed open his soul beneath her soft brown eyes and picked apart his weakness. _Pick yourself up, Dameron_ , he’d seen reflected in those eyes. _You don’t need to be in the cockpit of an X-Wing. Remold yourself. Do better. Be better. You have it in you_.

Poe fingers the ring on its sturdy chain around his neck. Tucked beneath the layers of his flight suit, close to his heart, the metal is warm. He just wants it all to stop for five minutes.

He just wants to rest.

Instead, he inspects every inch of the Falcon. Checks their fuel reserves, the supplies in the hold, and manages to avoid being in the same space as General Organa for more than a few seconds – can’t bear to have her look at him with such sympathy, such weight, so many expectations. He helps the remaining Resistance members set up beds in the cargo bay with a sure smile and a warm hand on their shoulders, helps get their injured settled in the two banks of triple bunks, including Paige Tico’s sweet baby sister. Paige who would still be here if it weren’t for him. For his rash, stupid choices.

His hands don’t stop shaking. He doesn’t so much as stop to sit, to breathe – threads his fingers into his thick curly hair and smells the salt of Crait on his skin, the carbon smoke of blaster fire, and prowls the corridors of the Falcon with the ache growing tighter and tighter in his chest.

In the pilot’s chair, brushing mottled, chirping creatures off his console, Chewbacca garbles out an insistence that Poe “find somewhere to sit down and stop making a damned nuisance of himself” and shoos him away. Which is how he finds himself with his back to the Falcon’s storage lockers, clutching at the roots of his hair as he slides to the floor, praying no one will find him while he takes a moment – just a moment – to struggle to remember how to breathe.

What has he done?

_Reckless. Flyboy._

The Bombardiers. Black Squadron. Gone in the sheering of durasteel and rolling fire.

_Good lives lost – they were heroes._

_Dead ones._

A handful of them left, and he is stumbling blind in the darkness and Leia says “ _well don’t look at me. Lead them like you mean it, Dameron_.”

He is leading them to their deaths. They weigh so heavy on him – each heartbeat on this ship, each fragile life form that still clings to a scrap of life. Of hope. And he hasn’t let go of the dead, drags them along behind him in the dust, feels their weight around his ankles, hauling him down and down and crushing the air from his lungs with the burden of so much loss and fear and grief.

And then there’s a pair of boots and crouching legs in black trousers, and that rich, rambling voice that he’s missed so terribly – had spent so many hours aching to hear again – draws him back from the brink, asking “Poe? Whoa. Whoa, hey, Poe – are you all right?”

The strangled sound he manages is not reassuring in the least. Poe’s fingers tighten in his hair, spasming with another shudder of grief and burning shame.

_Hot shot._

_You’re going to get them all killed._

“S’all my fault.”

“Poe?” And when he drags his eyes up from the pattern of the Falcon’s floor tiles, he realizes it is not the salted earth of Crait he tastes on his lips, but his own tears.

The grief is a raw, aching hole in him. Ragged and torn open. And he feels flayed, fragile, like he’s been ripped apart by the Dark Side all over again and left in tatters. It hurts so much just to breathe.

“Hey,” eyes as a dark and vast as the space that hurtles by beyond the hull, they reflect the bulkhead lights like streaks of starlight. And Poe can only imagine what he must look like – wet and crumpled and crumbling around the edges – because Finn’s broad, open face is so easy to read, and the shock scrambles across his features before he can hide it, before it reforms itself into an ever more deeply knotted anxiety. “Stop thinking,” Finn admonishes him in that terribly soft voice. “Stop thinking so much – talk to me.”

Talk. Talk to him. To Finn. Finn who is there, so close, a worried knot between his eyebrows and a question poised on his full, half-parted lips. Finn who went screaming across the expanse of white and blood red earth in a shuddering, shot-to-pieces rust bucket of a landspeeder with courage roaring in his heart and Poe and Rose on the comms begging him to stop.

He’d been too much of a coward to do anything about it.

Too much of a coward to stop Finn. Too much of a coward to push the attack. He’d frozen. Panicked. Heard that horrible, ringing voice in his head saying _it’s all your fault – you’re leading them to their deaths. Fearless Leader_.

Poe chokes on another attempt at words. Swallows it down. _Not you. Not you too_ , He thinks. Unconscious, one trembling hand lifts and he lays his calloused palm against the stone-smooth curve of Finn’s dark cheek _. I couldn’t bear to lose you too_.

“It hurts so much.” The admission cracks at the end, pitches itself too high. Wrenched from somewhere deep and visceral inside himself, and he hates the flavor of it on his tongue; like failure. His mother’s ring leaves a deep red groove in the palm of his hand.

“I know it does.” And there’s a fragile sort of quaver in Finn’s voice that makes something in Poe’s chest hurt even as it uncurls. Releases. Finn covers his hand with his own, warm and dry, rough with blaster callouses. “I know – but you don’t have to carry it all yourself, Poe.”

“I killed them.” He thinks of Paige, of Bastian, and Slip and it’s a ragged, terrible sob that tears its way out of him, leaves him bent gasping over his knees with only Finn’s hands on his shoulders to keep him from pressing his forehead to the floor in supplication. Penance. “I let them die.”

“No.” Finn resettles himself, and there is nothing but resolve in the set of his shoulders when he cups Poe’s face in both his hands, gathers the pilot up so that they are pressed forehead-to-forehead, so close that Poe can feel the trembling of Finn’s breath when he speaks. “No. That’s not how this works, remember? Free will. We make our own choices.” The former Stormtrooper. He should know.

Poe cannot help the tremors of doubt on his lips, the niggling shame. “They trusted me,” he sobs. “They trusted me and it got them killed.”

“Everyone makes a choice.” And Finn thinks of blood streaking the visual readouts of his helmet, of the mission to Jakku and their desperate flight in the stolen TIE fighter. He thinks of choosing to leave on Takodana, and then choosing to stay, and of Rey who told them in frantic, rambling snatches of Kylo Ren who had chosen to fall. Fall. Fall to the Dark Side.

Poe thinks of Admiral Holdo and the silence before the implosion of the _Supremacy_. Of Leia who has chosen him to be their leader, to light their way. Of Black Squadron and the Bombardiers who chose him to lead them through the hellfire. “I can’t be the leader they need me to be.”

Finn’s steady, sturdy hands pet his hair, stroke his back. And he doesn’t deserve to be held so kindly, to be kissed and cradled with such gentleness when there was no one to hold Paige as the bombs exploded, when his squadron are comforted by the vacuum of space and floating debris. But he holds on tighter, the leather of his old jacket creaking in his death grip. Don’t let go. Don’t let me go. Finn’s chin bumps against his temple when he murmurs “you already are.” The hand keeps stroking through his curls. “I’d follow you to the ends of the universe if you asked – I know I can’t make you see that. But you are a leader, Poe. A damn good one.”

Poe lets his eyes shutter closed, leans into Finn’s steadying touch. Knows that he will be kept on course. “I’m so tired,” he whispers. The salt stings his red-rimmed eyes. “So damn tired.”

“I know.” Finn smooths the tangle of curls from his forehead and kisses him there. Then kisses each eyelid for good measure. There was too much tenderness in him to ever make it as a ‘trooper, and Poe thanks the stars for that. “I know,” Finn repeats “I got you.”

There are only so many places to hide on a YT-1300f light freighter, even one that’s had every nook and cranny modified for smuggling by the likes of Han Solo, and Leia knows every inch of the Falcon despite the years since she’s set foot inside her husband’s oldest haunt. So it’s no surprise that she manages to find her wayward pilot eventually.

Finn sits with his back against the storage lockers, head tipped back to study the flicker of the overhead lights, as his fingers play idly with Poe’s curls. Poe, who is slack jawed and soft faced and curled on the floor with his head pillowed on the former stormtrooper’s lap. Poe, who looks so young with the lines of tension and anguish erased from his handsome poster-boy features. Finn rolls the knob of his skull against the locker door, fixes Leia with a wary, curious stare – equal parts respectful of the General, the Resistance Leader, and equal parts ready to tell her to kark off and let the poor man get some real sleep for the first time in who knew how many cycles.

Leia meets his nervous, defiant stare with the faintest of smiles, a slight crinkling at the corners of her brilliant, warm eyes. “Thank you,” she says, and she means it. In so many ways. Thank you for what you did today. For what you’ve done for the Resistance. For your strength. For looking out for him. Thank you for keeping the light burning.

With his ramrod straight spine and the bit of panic showing in the whites of his eyes, Finn flicks his gaze from Poe’s slack, sleeping face to Leia and back again. “What you’re asking of him,” he manages “Poe’s the best of them – you know that – but he can’t shoulder all this alone.”

She nods, the line of her mouth thinning as she considers his words. The words of a former traitor. An ex-stormtrooper. Weighs them like they mean something. “It’s a good thing he isn’t alone then,” Leia says at last, thoughtful. “And that he has you to remind him.”

She thinks of Holdo’s words, of the way Poe had turned them into a battle cry – emblazoned them across his heart. _We are the spark that will light the fire that will burn the First Order down_.

A spark cannot burn alone.


End file.
